Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water (15 page)

Brit said, “Yeah?”

“Yeah, this submarine, it’s amazing. There are no seams, no moving parts. It’s so elegant. And, the fact that I know exactly how it works just makes it more impressive. I mean, it’s all the same basic things we’ve all been doing all along, replicating, materializing, levitating, and moving through time and space, but it just never occurred to us to put it all together like this.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

“I, uh,” Phillip stammered, “I once made a car indestructible, and gave it unlimited fuel. I thought that was pretty clever. I see now that was so needlessly complex. I could have just made it move forward without the engine. It would have been silent, which would be a bit weird, but I’d have thought of some way around that.”

“That’s an easy fix,” Brit said. “It’s not hard to alter
something’s
sound and light signatures. This bubble is completely silent and invisible.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh yeah. We could hover over Disneyland watching kids ride the teacups for an hour and nobody would see us.”

“That would be great for hopping around time checking out historic events,” Phillip said.

“Yeah,” Brit agreed, “I considered that, but then I realized that most of history is made up of things I’m actually pretty happy that I wasn’t there to see.”

“Good point. I once went to the Kennedy assassination. I wanted to see who that shadowy figure on the grassy knoll was.”

Brit’s eyes widened. “You actually went to the grassy knoll?”

Phillip nodded.

“Who was there?” Brit asked.

Phillip gritted his teeth. “Nobody, until I got there. Luckily, not many people saw me. I managed to stay in the shadows.”

They continued their tour of the reef in silence for a moment, then Phillip continued. “Anyway, like I was saying, it just never occurred to me to assemble these kinds of complex constructions, like this sub, or the elevator platforms, or frankly, Atlantis itself. I’m just blown away by it all, and Gwen tells me it was all your idea.”

“Yup,” Brit said. “My idea.”

Phillip said, “Well done.”

Without turning to face him, Brit said, “I’ll pass your compliment along to Brit the Elder.”

Phillip cursed himself. Here he was trying to pay her a compliment, and he had said the exact wrong thing. He started to apologize, but Brit cut him off.

“No, Phillip. I’m sorry. You were just being nice, and I
handled
that gracelessly. I did come up with the ideas. Laying down materials an atom at a time, using the objects made that way to build complex structures and devices, building Atlantis if it didn’t already exist, heck, going to Atlantis in the first place, they were all my ideas. The whole reason I wanted to go to Atlantis was that I had all these things I wanted to try, and it’s hard to do that when you’re living with your parents in Racine, Wisconsin.”

“What did you do for a living in Racine?” Phillip asked.

“I was a tour guide at the Johnson Wax building. That Frank Lloyd Wright really knew how to design a building, except for the roofs. They always leak. Seems like a funny thing for the world’s greatest architect to be bad at, roofs. It’s kinda the
primary
reason to make a building in the first place, wouldn’t you say? To keep the rain out?”

Phillip agreed.

“Anyway,” Brit continued, “I had all these crazy ideas I couldn’t wait to try, and no place to try them, so I go back in time to Atlantis, and when I get there, Brit the Elder is waiting for me with the good news that she already tried my ideas, and they all worked. She’d used them to build the city, just like I wanted to, and all of the people who live there are very grateful, to her.”

“I can see why you’d resent that. Just trying to be positive, though, the whole reason she’s here is that you go back in time at some point in the future and become her, so you will get to build the city, and you do get to try all of your ideas, and eventually, you will get the credit.”

Brit turned, looked at Phillip, and said, “Please, Phillip, don’t be so positive. It’s not becoming for people like us,” which got a small laugh out of Phillip. She continued, “And, when I do go back and build, I won’t really be designing and building, I’ll be copying what was here when I got here. I’ll be copying
from her.”

“But if she’s you . . .”

“Then who am I copying? Who designed Atlantis in the first place? I don’t know, but I do know that it wasn’t me, and really, that’s all I care about right now.”

Phillip started to say something, but Brit put a finger across his lips to silence him. She smiled, but with firmness in her tone, she said, “And, frankly, I’m talking about someone I can’t stand. If the best thing you can think of to cheer me up is to tell me that I’ll be just like her someday, I’d suggest that you probably shouldn’t bother.”

Phillip smiled and nodded. Brit took her finger away.

They rode in silence as strange, colorful sea creatures swam past. Brit piloted the bubble over a tall stand of coral, and before them, a vista of brightly colored shapes stretched on as far as they could see.

Brit said, “So, Phillip. You haven’t had much to say about the reef. What do you think?”

“It’s very nice,” Phillip said. He looked around a bit then added, “Pretty.”

Brit looked at him, a smile slowly growing on her face. She bit her lip, then turned her attention to the control panel in front of her. She scrolled through more menu options before looking back up to Phillip.

“Okay, Phil. I’ve shown you something pretty. Now, how would you like to see something really cool?”

“Yes, please!”

Brit tapped the controls and everything went black.
Phillip’s
eyes strained to adjust to the light, but there was no light to adjust to. After a second or two he saw the control panel emit a subtle glow.

“Where are we?” Phillip whispered.

“”Very, very deep,” Brit answered in an equally hushed tone.

“Why are we whispering?” Phillip asked.

“I don’t know. You started it,” she whispered, then added in a more conversational tone, “Nothing can hear us while we’re inside this sphere.”

Phillip surveyed the vista around them. “I can see why you brought me here. This is definitely the darkest dark I’ve ever seen.”

Brit said, “Just wait. It gets better,” as she hit a few buttons, and the darkness around them flashed and took on a greenish glow. What had looked like nothing but a solid field of black was now a vast three-dimensional galaxy of faint, light-green stars, drifting slowly around them.

“What happened?” Phillip asked.

“I set the sphere to filter the infra-red spectrum so that it’s visible to us. Also, the sphere is emitting infra-red, or else there still wouldn’t be anything to see down here.”

“Why is it all green?” Phillip asked.

“Because it looks cool that way. Kinda night-visiony. I can change it if you like.”

“No,” Phillip said, “please leave it. What are all of these things floating around us?”

“Debris. Dead krill. Fish poop. I don’t know, to be honest. They’re not what we came to see.”

“What did we come to see?”

Brit smiled. “We’ll get to that in a minute. First, Gwen tells me you’re from the eighties, right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, what do you know about giant squid?”

“Huh,” Phillip said, thinking. “Giant squid. Let’s see.
Sailors
used to tell stories about them, most likely to impress other
sailors
. They used to draw them on maps. They made a really cool mechanical one for the movie
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
.”

Brit hit a button, and the dots of light that surrounded them started to move in unison, and all in the same direction,
telling
Phillip that the craft was moving. The effect was much like driving in a snowstorm, or how Phillip imagined flying in an extremely fast spaceship would look. “Are they real?” Brit asked, then added, “Giant squids?”

“No,” Phillip said. “I mean, I’ve read stuff about big tentacles washing up on beaches, but that’s mostly tabloid stuff. I’d guess they’re no more real than the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot.”

“Yeah,” Brit said, “probably. Say, what’s that?” She pointed straight ahead. At first Phillip didn’t see what she meant.
He squin
ted, and in the distance he saw a ghostly image of something, something graceful and fluid. It almost looked like an immense snake, reaching out for them.
Maybe an eel
, Phillip thought. It was getting closer, or, to be more accurate, they were gaining on it. As whatever it was came clearer, Phillip could see that it wasn’t an eel. At the very least, it was several eels
swimming
together. As they drew even closer, Phillip saw some dark mass ahead of the things, whatever they were. Were they chasing it?
No,
Phillip could see now,
they’re part of it!

“It can’t be,” Phillip said.

“It is,” Brit replied. “It’s Bigfoot.”

Brit maneuvered the craft out from behind the giant squid, accelerating to come up alongside of it. “Cool, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes, very, in a ghastly sort of way. The way the tentacles move, it’s almost hypnotic.” Phillip watched for a moment, then asked, “Did you make it?”

“No,” Brit said. “It’s real. One of the girls is into marine
biology
. When she found out about this craft and what it can do, she went off in search of all the coolest things she’d ever read about. We’ve got them all cataloged so we can come check them out any time. It’s better than any aquarium.”

“Its eye is bigger than my head,” Phillip said. “It can’t see us, can it?”

“No, it can’t see or hear us. It has no idea we’re here.”

“Good.”

They kept pace with the squid, watching in silence as it
barreled
through the dark. After a long silence, Phillip said, “Brit, I haven’t known you long, but I’ve been thinking about your situation.”

Brit laughed. “Phillip, we’re deep below the surface of the sea, looking at a creature that until five minutes ago you thought was a myth, and you want to talk about me?”

“What can I say,” Phillip said, “I just find some things particularly interesting.”

In the low light, Phillip couldn’t be sure that she had blushed, but he chose to believe that she had. “Look,” he said. “We know that we’re in a computer program, and knowing that allows us to play around with it to do things. Make things, fly, travel through time, that sort of thing. But Brit, none of us knows how the
program
really works. We tell ourselves that we do, but really we just understand bits of it. We think we know what happened when you came to Atlantis for the first time, but really, we have no idea how the program handled it. We just know what your experience of it was.”

Phillip paused a moment to give Brit a chance to tell him to shut up. She didn’t, so he continued. “You’re thinking of it as if your life has been an unbroken thread that just happens to loop back around on itself, but what if it’s not? What if you are the end of the thread, like the rest of us?”

“But Phillip, Brit the Elder is here. You can’t ignore her. Believe me, I’ve tried. She’s here, she’s me, and she remembers everything I do.”

“Or, so it would seem,” Phillip said, “but what if, the instant you got the idea to go further back in time and create Atlantis yourself if you had to, the program, whatever it is, took that to be the plan. Then, when you transported, it triggered the plan you had created, like a subroutine. So the program paused our reality—”

“Can it do that?” Brit asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t see why it couldn’t, and if it did, we’d never know. So, anyway, it pauses reality, and creates a second copy of you, which then runs through a projected version of events, seeing that there’s nothing here, treading water for a few minutes presumably, then going back in time and creating the city. Then the program blasts through a thumbnail version of the past, what, hundred years? Then, when it has the past laid out, it restarts the program and you turn up, for the first time, from your point of view.”

Brit shook her head. “Maybe, but I don’t see how that makes any difference, and besides, that doesn’t explain how she
remembers
everything I’ve done.”

“Yes, it does. And it makes all of the difference. It means that you’re the real you, and she’s an imitation, created as a
placeholder
until the real thing is ready to take over, and her memories are being created on the fly by the program to reflect her past, which you’re creating now. You’ve been thinking the things she’s done affect you, but in truth, the things you do affect her. She’s just a puppet you, being changed constantly to reflect the actions you’ve taken, or are likely to take. Her past actions didn’t create you. Your current actions create her.”

Brit thought about it, then asked, “That explains how she remembers the things I’ve thought and done, but what about when she predicts the things that are going to happen to me?”

Phillip shrugged. “Maybe it’s the power of suggestion. You believe she knows your future, so when she says something’s going to happen, you make it happen. I don’t know. The good news is, you’re not doomed to be just like her if you don’t want to be. Brit, you can become anything you like and she will change to reflect your choices. If I’m right, you have more control over her than she does over you.”

“That is good news,” Brit said quietly, as if not wanting to be over heard. “What’s the bad news? There is bad news, I assume.”

Phillip took a deep breath “There’s always bad news. If I’m right, you can die.”

“Which is why you’re so worried that someone is trying to kill me.”

“Yes.”

They were both so absorbed in the implications of their
discussion
that they nearly didn’t notice the hollow popping noise, like a champagne bottle being uncorked.

A shrill, brittle tearing sound surrounded them as the
diamond
sphere that kept Phillip and Brit safe and dry was clouded by thousands of tiny, spider-web cracks. They had just enough time to realize what was happening, then see the looks of panic on each other’s faces before the sphere catastrophically imploded.